The media gave both charge and defense equal space; even the Post twinned their coverage of the MacGregor press conference with a sober-sided analysis piece of MacGregor’s baseless claims of McGovern ties to the violence against Nixon campaign offices. An astonishing watershed in American political history had passed: a major journalistic institution was willfully and cynically discredited by a president as if it were a rival political candidate—the Washington Post as Jerry Voorhis, or Helen Gahagan Douglas. And the president had no trouble getting away with it.
